The specification relates to vehicular networking systems. In particular, the specification relates to a system and method for autonomously constructing groups of vehicle systems that form a forest in a vehicular network.
For smoothly exchanging significant information between mobile communication nodes in a vehicular network, it is beneficial to autonomously construct groups of the mobile communication nodes in the vehicular network. For example, mobile communication nodes such as vehicles are required to send their speeds to an infrastructure in a vehicular network. An existing way to do this is to have each vehicle access the infrastructure independently. However, the speeds of nearby vehicles are often similar. Therefore, if the speeds are averaged over a group via less expensive vehicular-to-vehicular communications before they are sent to the infrastructure, the high cost of the more expensive vehicular-to-infrastructure communications would be significantly reduced. Moreover, the possibility of contentions caused by a large amount of accesses to the infrastructure would be drastically reduced as well.
Existing vehicular networking systems have numerous problems. For example, in these systems it is difficult to efficiently define boundaries for disjoint groups of mobile communication nodes. Furthermore, in some situations (e.g., in an indefinitely long line of vehicles), it is not possible to decide what the boundary of a group should be deterministically by simply waiting until a neighbor group is formed.